


this room is on fire

by goshemily



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Legal, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anal Sex, Angst, Hand & Finger Kink, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oral Sex, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 20:31:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1360771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goshemily/pseuds/goshemily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Behold R, sad again. You told me last time that I was too loud to be sad; what would you do with my melancholy now, Enjolras?” He looks up. His eyes are very green.</p><p>Enjolras throws back his drink. “I’d ask you to fuck me,” he says. “That’s what I’d do with it.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	this room is on fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ark/gifts).



> [Ark](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ark) told me I should text her some lawyer AUs. This is what happened.
> 
> A billion thank yous to [barricadeur](http://archiveofourown.org/users/barricadeur), [Overnighter](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Overnighter), and [harborshore](http://archiveofourown.org/users/harborshore) for betaing.

Enjolras will not shake apart. He tells himself this and he walks out of the small office with shoulders square. What is important is to do his job well. He serves no one if he cannot listen.

He’s thrown by the calm in the street. The wars he’s visited before – always a visitor, he reminds himself; he has no right to communal grief – have all been loud. Sound eddied as tangible as the air that’s close and hot around him now. It’s like moving through an unpleasant fog; he’s cut off from everyone around him by the heat and the quiet.

He passes men and women and he wonders what their stories are, what they’ve seen and what they’ve done. He keeps moving, because this is not a moment for asking. He knows that much at least, now on his fourth UN mission, used to sitting in cramped rooms and asking people to tell the abuses of the state or of their neighbors: there is a set pattern to official investigations. The gloaming is not the time for asking, and that means that in the absence of too-near explosions Enjolras is left with his own thoughts.

His skin is taut and stretched like clear glass, a window through which everyone can see. There’s nothing inside.

He walks past the house where he’s renting a room, the most junior member of the investigation team relegated to the least privacy, but it’s no insult; they stay where there is space. He’s in his landlady’s son’s old bedroom, and he’s stopped trying to smile for her in the morning. Beloved football posters are still on the walls. He expects that she hates him, and every night he lies awake in her son’s bed staring at her son’s ceiling and wondering how to pay more for the room without insulting her jealous hospitality.

He can’t face her yet tonight.

There’s a bar at the edge of town that collects expats and deep pockets. Enjolras has been there with his colleagues, and with some of the NGOs – every time, they’ve been grinned at by the warlords across the room, men untouchable without warrants and without the guns to enforce them. Enjolras almost laughs. If he had a gun right now, he’d be more likely to join the rag-tag resistance than send those men to the security and luxury of a prison in The Hague.

But he doesn’t know where else to buy liquor here. In the many truths he’s collected, that hasn’t come up.

He holds up three fingers to the bartender when he arrives, and bends over the scarred bar to take in the rich color of his whiskey. There are few people here tonight he’d want to acknowledge.

There’s a loud laugh behind him. He wouldn’t look, but he has to know who can sound so happy in a place like this. The bartender keeps a Kalashnikov in plain sight and the fighters are never satisfied with what they’ve got. He turns. Who – 

R meets his eyes and stops laughing. He puts his hand on his bald friend’s arm and pats him absently. He stares at Enjolras.

Enjolras swallows. He steps backward into the bar just to feel something solid.

R stands and walks toward him. His walk is different now. It’s confident.

“Hello,” Enjolras says.

“It’s been awhile.”

“Six years.”

R nods. There are more differences: he’s tan, and looks more sure of himself. His eyes are still green and quizzical, though, and his hands still look like they should be sculpting. “We’re a long way from Paris.”

Enjolras shrugs, and doesn’t think about the changes he’s sure are writ naked on him. He doesn’t sleep much anymore.

“I’m not surprised you’re here,” R says, and looks Enjolras up and down. “You can’t say that to many people you run into in a warzone, but you had a certain intensity.”

“I don’t even know your real name,” Enjolras says. His voice is scraped raw.

R blinks. His eyelashes are still long and dark. “Grantaire,” he says.

“The journalist?”

“The very same. It passes the time.”

“I’m with the UN.”

Grantaire’s face clouds. “Refugee agency?”

“War crimes investigation.”

“My memory of that night is pretty spectacular. I recall you were eloquent about the evils of prosecution.”

“I’ve learned that bearing witness has its own importance.”

Grantaire steps closer and Enjolras is intoxicated. His hand tightens around his drink.

“I’m writing an article right now about how ineffectual you are at prevention,” Grantaire says. His smile is sharper than Enjolras remembers.

“I’d agree with you, but I worry you’d put it in your article.”

Grantaire frowns. “You’d agree, but you’re working for them anyway? That doesn’t sound like the man I know.”

“We had one night together at university. Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.”

“Maybe.”

They look at each other awhile longer. Enjolras’s glass is slippery in his hand. He tries to breathe evenly.

Grantaire breaks first. He laughs and rubs the back of his neck. Enjolras has a sense memory of biting him there, of how Grantaire’s skin had tasted.

“So you’re a bitter lawyer now, who knows the futility of what he’s doing.” There’s something odd in Grantaire’s tone. “Let me buy you another drink. I’m sure you could use it.” He nods to the bartender.

“I don’t,” Enjolras says, and swallows the rest of his whiskey. He lowers his glass to see Grantaire watching his throat.

“You can’t use it?” Grantaire asks after a pause, but doesn’t lift his eyes. “That’s a pity.”

“No,” and now Grantaire looks up, “I don’t know the futility of what I’m doing.”

Grantaire’s face is expressive and mercurial. He can still lift an eyebrow and have it be eloquent.

It makes Enjolras impatient. It makes him tired. It reminds him that he’s alone, having to defend his choice to a one-night stand as well as to everyone at home. He feels hollow.

“The UN fucks up,” he says bluntly. The bartender brings them each a fresh glass, and Enjolras raises his. “I’ll drink to that. But who are we if we don’t keep trying? The twentieth century didn’t bear out the promise of the nineteenth; the twenty-first will probably be worse. That doesn’t mean we aren’t beholden to each other, to the universality of our humanity. No, I don’t think prosecution is always the answer; you think I don’t want to shoot some of these fuckers in the head? Don’t print that,” he adds sharply when Grantaire’s face changes. “The world is violent; so should our response be. But we also have to shepherd the law. Right now, it’s my job to _listen_.”

“To bear witness,” Grantaire says.

Enjolras isn’t sure what R’s expression means. He’s gotten worse at reading people outside the four walls of his small office. “I’d think that as a journalist you’d understand that. I’ve read your articles.”

Grantaire shrugs. “Then you know I think there’s little enough to be done. It’s admirable that you’d try; you’re like the hamster that runs the wheel and won’t give up, even though you get nowhere. And what universality can there possibly be, when you and I both get to leave, and the people we interview don’t?”

“You’re right,” Enjolras says. He rubs his hand over his face and feels his edges waver. “There’s no universal society that doesn’t start from an equal base. But,” and he hears his voice getting more agitated, hates that he can’t keep this part of himself controlled, “even though it’s not enough, it’s _something_ to light the furnace for the future. Brotherhood –”

“That’s a tired argument, and you know it.” Grantaire almost sounds angry. “Don’t pretend, Enjolras.”

Enjolras has never been good at lying, and now he’s worn thin. He pictures bodies when he tries to sleep. But that doesn’t mean what little he has left isn’t still wholly him; he knows what a dying man looks like, and also what he wants the future to be.

“I don’t understand men without belief,” Enjolras says.

“No? Not after everything you’ve seen? Your face tells me it’s been enough.”

“ _Especially_ not after everything I’ve seen.” He breathes. He centers himself. “You think a man fights without a cause? Even if it’s his own advancement, there’s something burning in him. Even the men who fight from indifference are called, though to destruction.”

“You’re saying that a void is the same thing as the presence of passion. I’d like to admire your argument for its slipperiness,” and Grantaire comes even closer, puts his glass down right next to Enjolras’s elbow on the bar and leaves his hand there, so close Enjolras imagines he can feel the warmth radiating from Grantaire’s skin, though he can only feel the space between them and he aches, “but then I remember you’re basically a politician, and that your argument would have _me_ passionate, which I think we both know is a lie.”

Enjolras remembers Grantaire’s face when Enjolras thrust into him the first time, and how hard he’d gripped Enjolras’s hand. “I think a lack of passion is not your flaw.”

Grantaire laughs _again_. This, this is the sound that made Enjolras turn. “No, you’ve read me right; there’s your act of witness. I care enough to try to see things as they are – which is to say, inevitable. After all, aren’t your crimes predicated on other wars? Aren’t the things you investigate only recognizable because we’ve seen them before? Man is a giddy thing, and quick to dance on graves.”

“Better to dig a man’s grave than put him in it.” He holds his glass tighter, presses his fingers into the smooth surface.

“You’re equating the digger and the dancer, and not that I disagree – oh, don’t pull that face, I’ve lived six years wanting to see you look a stone angel again, and petulance spoils the picture – but, Captain, we’re used to the killing. When you witness, you do it for yourself alone.”

Enjolras is an exposed nerve. “Investigation creates a record. I take statements, and we figure out what crimes have occurred. We report –”

“Yes, yes, just like me, I know. I report to the world, you report to the prosecutor, the prosecutor decides what crimes to charge, the judges decide what warrants to issue.” Grantaire speaks quickly, his words falling over each other like they’re fighting to get out of his mouth. “Meanwhile, and I tell you this from my own experience – and I know you’re not a man to brush aside anyone telling their truths – the world keeps turning and _doesn’t care_. You’re alone in that.” He pulls himself back abruptly, puts space between them, ducks his head. “Behold R, sad again. You told me last time that I was too loud to be sad; what would you do with my melancholy now, Enjolras?” He looks up. His eyes are very green.

Enjolras throws back his drink. “I’d ask you to fuck me,” he says. “That’s what I’d do with it.”

Six years ago and countries away, Grantaire’s eyes had widened just like that. “I wasn’t sure you’d still have me,” he says.

“Are you still good?”

“I’m told so. I’d convey to you all my exploits, I’d have bald L’aigle in the corner there declare it like a coat of arms – I keep all my eagles spread like a banner, you know – but isn’t it your job to investigate? Why don’t you just come home with me and find out?”

If nothing else, Enjolras can hold to the cadences of Grantaire’s voice.

They still haven’t touched.

“You’ll see,” Grantaire says, and finishes the last of his drink. He sets the glass down on the bar with a weighty thump, and waves goodbye to L’aigle.

He takes Enjolras back to his hotel, “If you can call it that; six rooms seem hardly worth the name.” They still don’t touch as they walk through the silent streets. If he couldn’t hear the heavy tread of Grantaire’s combat boots, Enjolras might think Grantaire a ghost. Maybe he is.

He follows Grantaire up a rickety wooden staircase at the back of the building. The banister is rough under his hand.

“It has a bed, anyway,” Grantaire says as he pushes open the door. “We’ve both slept in far worse.”

“I thought we weren’t going to be sleeping tonight.”

Grantaire pauses in the middle of the room. “There’s a light by the door,” he says.

Enjolras pulls the curtains back instead. There’s some brightness from the moon.

Grantaire waits for him. 

Enjolras is brave and forthright. Combeferre told him that once at university, and he’s cherished it and held himself to it ever since. He needs a body to touch, and he knows Grantaire’s.

He walks to Grantaire and cradles his jaw with one hand. He rubs his thumb across Grantaire’s cheek. The stubble catches on the pad of his thumb and Enjolras is glad: Grantaire feels real.

Grantaire grins and Enjolras feels the muscles in his face move.

R fists his hand in the hair at the base of Enjolras’s neck and wraps it round and round his fingers, reeling Enjolras in. He kisses Enjolras, and his mouth is hot. He draws back and bites Enjolras’s lip gently. Enjolras licks over the bite, reflex, and Grantaire slides a finger after Enjolras’s tongue.

Enjolras opens his mouth and Grantaire pushes his finger inside, runs it along his teeth. Enjolras lets his mouth fall open a little more.

Grantaire’s eyes are dark. He moves two fingers in now; they’re long and slender and they taste like salt when he rubs them back and forth over Enjolras’s tongue. He holds still and Enjolras licks the crease between them until Grantaire starts moving again. Enjolras swallows.

“Christ,” Grantaire murmurs. He leans in and kisses Enjolras past his own fingers, licks around them even as he’s still pushing them into Enjolras’s mouth, and Enjolras isn’t fully anchored but he feels surrounded by Grantaire. Grantaire tugs at his hair and steps closer, brackets Enjolras between his legs. He presses in and down with his fingers. 

It’s not enough.

Enjolras pulls back, just far enough that Grantaire withdraws his hand and holds onto Enjolras’s waist instead, but not far enough that he’ll let go of his hair.

“I want to suck your cock.”

“I won’t say no.” Grantaire looks at him intently and tugs his hair again. “You’re sharper than you used to be.”

“Am I supposed to be impressed by psychoanalysis? I don’t want you for your pillow talk.”

“Fucking a famous war correspondent doesn’t get you hot? Plenty of people would pay to hear me talk.” Grantaire’s running his hand up and down Enjolras’s side, under his shirt. His palm is warm and broad.

“Not me.”

Grantaire’s mouth twists. “Yeah, well, they shouldn’t either.”

“Six years ago I wouldn’t have pegged you as caring what you were paid to do.”

“Time changes all of us.” It’s not said with judgment, but with plain honesty.

“Please be quiet,” Enjolras says. He refuses to look away but he doesn’t want to be looked at. He rubs his thumb across Grantaire’s cheek again.

“Make me,” Grantaire says. It’s infuriatingly gentle, and Enjolras is grateful. It’s pathetic, but he’ll take any out he’s given.

“If I must, I must.” He kneels.

“Ever a victim of duty,” Grantaire says. “It’s nice to know memory doesn’t lie. You really do catch the light with your face and throw it back; you are radiant, and we who see you are ourselves irradiated.”

“Liar.” Enjolras refuses to be a deity when he is so eager to be a man, and he knows that in reality he’s neither.

He unzips Grantaire’s fly and pulls down his jeans. He looks at Grantaire’s cock, flushed and mostly hard. He licks his palm and strokes and it’s so warm in his hand. Enjolras noses along it, kisses Grantaire’s thigh; he leans back and keeps stroking.

“This I’d think you’d know. Paris wasn’t so long ago as all that.” Grantaire’s going for nonchalance, Enjolras thinks, but his voice is strained. “If you wouldn’t mind –”

“Do you _ever_ shut up?” Enjolras asks, and he leans forward and swallows.

Grantaire's cock is so much richer than his fingers. It tastes like Enjolras remembers. He loves the weight of it in his mouth, the musk and the salt. He pulls back and then goes down again, deep and insistent until Grantaire finally starts thrusting.

Grantaire mutters curses and praise above. Everything with him is words. “I remember you liking this, I remembered it and got off on it so many times, fuck, Enjolras, you should see yourself –”

Grantaire strokes Enjolras’s throat almost reverently, traces along it and Enjolras can’t breathe. He draws air through his nose and focuses again. Grantaire runs his hand up and down the column of Enjolras’s neck, circles around and touches Enjolras’s lips where they’re stretched around his cock. He doesn’t push a finger inside, though Enjolras almost wishes he would, something else to make Enjolras present.

Then Grantaire thumbs gently under Enjolras’s eyes and Enjolras realizes he’s crying from the force of this. Grantaire tugs him back with a hand in his hair and waits.

Enjolras has to decide to go down again; R won’t push. It’s an easy choice. He’s being touched and held and his skin doesn’t feel so much like it’s going to shatter. He breathes and goes back down. 

“Do you want me to come in your mouth?” Grantaire asks. “I’m clean, it’s fine if you want that, but I should warn you it’s gonna happen soon –”

Enjolras draws back quickly and makes his fingers a ring, holds the base of Grantaire’s cock tightly. He looks up at R and pleads. This needs to be more. If it ends he’s going to shake to pieces. “Please fuck me,” he begs. “Please, please –”

“Whoa, hey,” Grantaire says against his ragged breathing. He pets Enjolras’s head gently, runs his hand through Enjolras’s hair. “It’s okay, come on, it’s okay.”

Enjolras leans against his thigh and shudders. He keeps his fingers tight around Grantaire’s cock and closes his eyes and keeps panting. Grantaire’s skin is soft.

“Please say you’ll do it,” Enjolras says. 

“I’d do anything,” Grantaire says. He cups Enjolras’s chin with strong fingers and tilts Enjolras’s face up.

Enjolras knows he can think through the steps of this if he tries. He takes Grantaire’s hand and stands.

He’s at a loss.

Then Grantaire hugs him. He wraps his arms around Enjolras and holds him close, and there’s not enough skin because they’re both still mostly dressed, but he’s held.

“I’d not profane you,” Grantaire murmurs into Enjolras’s hair, “I’d not pretend a skeptic could restore the faith you’ve never lost. You’re an intoxicating priest, E, and I’d worship poorly at your table, but I want to do it anyway. I want to listen to you. When was the last time you told _your_ story?”

Enjolras says nothing.

“You hear everyone else’s – and before you protest, I _know_ they’re not the same kind – but when was the last time you let someone really touch you?”

“It’s been awhile,” Enjolras says. He thinks Grantaire knows what it’s like to be made of thousands of shards.

Grantaire hugs him tightly again and then steps back, hands still held fast on Enjolras’s shoulders. “I will be more than glad to fuck you,” he says. “How do you want me, Captain?”

“Just touch me,” Enjolras says.

“I can do that.”

They get naked quickly. The longest wait is for Grantaire to untie the knots in his shoe laces. “Can’t just leave ‘em undone,” he says, seated before Enjolras on the bed and pulling them off finally. “I’ve had too much mud come in that way. Scorpions too.”

Enjolras smiles and runs a hand down Grantaire’s arm.

R grabs his hand. He kisses each one of Enjolras’s knuckles, and then turns Enjolras’s hand over and kisses his palm softly, right in the center. “Get on the bed,” he says.

Enjolras stretches out on his back on the terrible mattress. His desperation is mostly gone; now he thrums, still taut and too empty but holding onto the trust that he won’t wait long.

Grantaire gets lube from his battered duffle bag. He holds up a condom and Enjolras shakes his head. “I’m clean too,” he says.

Grantaire nods. He kneels between Enjolras’s spread legs and crooks one of them up; Enjolras holds it for him. Grantaire coats a few fingers with lube, and as he holds one right against Enjolras, he pushes two fingers of his other hand into Enjolras’s mouth. Enjolras sucks on them and concentrates on the taste, on the feeling of Grantaire filling him. Grantaire moves his hands in tandem, stretching Enjolras while shoving deep into his mouth.

Grantaire starts talking again, even as he’s scissoring two fingers in Enjolras’s ass. “When I close my eyes, I don’t see _Guernica_ or Jacob Lawrence. I wish I did. It would be easier. Fuck, I’d settle for Twombley, and I don’t even like him.”

He pulls his fingers out of Enjolras’s mouth long enough for Enjolras to say, “It’s hard to take his name seriously.” 

“His work on the Iliad is red. I understand blue paint better; what else is man, but awaiting illumination? You do that, Enjolras. You shed a light on our dark actions.”

“There are great journalists,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire runs his fingers over Enjolras’s lips, rubbing Enjolras’s spit into his own skin. “We’re talking ourselves back to the hamster wheel. There _are_ great journalists, and I’ll even grant you great men.” He crooks his other fingers inside Enjolras. “I see such misery that I can only assume God is as poor a beggar as ever there was; certainly not rich in imagination. If He were, there’d be a way out of this mess that’s easier than making men care.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you for an absolutist.”

Grantaire pushes his fingers back into Enjolras’s mouth, and Enjolras swallows, demands that they move too; he closes his eyes and lets himself feel all the ways Grantaire is inside him.

“No, only a fatalist,” Grantaire says. “And you forget that if I hadn’t parroted your speech back to you, done my best to sound like your belief, you wouldn’t have taken me at all.”

That’s not true. In that dingy student bar in Paris, Enjolras hadn’t respected Grantaire, but he’d wanted him. He’d have gone to R’s bed whether or not Grantaire had taken it on himself to play revolutionary. “Get him off and get him for our side,” Courfeyrac had said, and grinned. “We could use that tongue.”

Enjolras has never been a man for half-measures. They’d fucked three times that night, and in the morning he hadn’t asked R for his name. By then he’d known R would never join idealists’ ranks.

Now Grantaire pulls back, and “I’d rather be taken,” Enjolras says, “if it’s all the same to you.”

“Three times, and I never did this,” Grantaire says. “Give me a minute to take in the sanctity.” He splays Enjolras’s legs wider, and runs his hands along Enjolras’s thighs. He holds himself still, breathes twice, then pushes into Enjolras.

Enjolras doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He shoves himself up and gets them behind Grantaire’s neck so he can kiss him, he runs them over Grantaire’s back, he lets himself feel Grantaire’s stubbled cheek one more time. He’s been drowning and now he’s caught.

“I’ll hold you,” Grantaire says, or Enjolras thinks he says; he hears it, anyway, as Grantaire pushes him back down on the mattress and has him bend both legs up. Enjolras locks them behind Grantaire’s back, cradles Grantaire in the same way he feels cradled.

Grantaire leans over him, covering him, kissing him and fucking him hard and finally, God, _finally_ , touching Enjolras’s cock.

“Noticed the lack, did you?” he asks when he sees Enjolras’s face.

“Best for last,” Enjolras manages to say, and throws his head back as Grantaire grips him just how he likes (how Grantaire remembers he likes, six years later), stroking slow and firm. Enjolras is suspended between Grantaire’s cock and his hand and his rough voice.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he croons. “Give it up. Come on, Enjolras.”

He twists his hand, and Enjolras comes.

He opens his eyes to Grantaire watching him carefully. He doesn’t smile, but he lets Grantaire look. In the past six years, he’s imagined R judging, sardonic.

“Good man,” Grantaire says quietly. He smears his come-covered hand across Enjolras’s mouth. Enjolras chases Grantaire’s fingers with his tongue. He cleans them.

Grantaire leans down and kisses him messily, and thrusts again, and comes too.

His come is hot inside Enjolras, and he bites Enjolras’s shoulder very gently. He doesn’t yet pull out. 

Soon enough they’ll need water, a shower if it can be had, but for now they lie together in the too-close air. Enjolras counts their breaths. In, out.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Nick Flynn’s poem “[fire](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181214).”
> 
> Picasso’s _Guernica_ is [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_\(painting\)). Jacob Lawrence’s “War Series” is [here](http://whitney.org/Collection/JacobLawrence%20). Cy Twombley’s “Fifty Days at Iliam” is [here](http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/results.html?searchTxt=cy+twombley+iliam&keySearch=+Search+&bSuggest=1&searchNameID=&searchClassID=&searchOrigin=&searchDeptID=&page=1).


End file.
